This has been dawning on me as well.
Aside from all the things people are mentioning, my take on it: culture, at least in the U.S., has stopped. If a person finds something to be excited about, they do so in spite of their government that should otherwise be helping them flourish. We try to find joy in spite of the profound inequitable conditions that are celebrated by the elite. We have to give up a third of our paychecks to fund pointless destruction and slaughter overseas, and lavish lifestyles for our feckless politicians and federally-subsidized billionaires at home.
What collective identity can we develop under these conditions? We only find an identity defined by anger. Hatred. Resentment. We must constantly experience these feelings in order to remain grounded in reality; they are the only way we can stay in touch with the truth of things.
I’m sure it’s been articulated better elsewhere, but I’m starting to think that’s a big part of fascism: the death of culture, the destruction of what we could otherwise draw hope from. Fascism says that everything people cherish and find self-actualization in is sinful and aberrant, but offers nothing to replace them except hollow parodies of culture. In the current moment, it’s either Christian white nationalist parodies of culture (just look at literally any creative work they make; they are soulless and hollow) or AI-generated slop culture.
We’re also living through something pretty unprecedented: corporate technofascism. History has never seen fascism breed with the kind of unchecked capitalist insanity that will come to define this era. There are a thousand digital barriers between you and real life, and you are told you should be happy and excited about such “innovation” when it’s been 10 years since there was anything to be excited about.
That’s my distilled diatribe on this idea.
I was going to grab a 9070 XT, but I also wanted to start mainly using a local LLM instead of contributing to data center use, so I snagged a used 7900 XTX for $750 off eBay for the greater VRAM capacity. Works like a charm, and the local Qwen model is performing great. Totally worth it. It’s my first Radeon card because I wanted to dodge the ridiculous Nvidia AI markups, but it’s already showing signs of running better with my Linux machine, so I don’t expect I’ll be going back to the green menace.